I intend to argue below that fundamental values are not necessarily compatible, and when they conflict, it is the obligation of leaders and citizens generally to choose between values.
It is my position that, in relation to the Naga nationalist issue, although truth and justice may lead to the conclusion that the Naga people should have a sovereign nation of their own, this goal conflicts with the right of the Naga people to life, and that life should take precedent over truth and justice.
I consider Kaka Iralu a friend. Although our initial exchange of articles in The Morung Express (see May 10, 12, 16, 18, 2016) were confrontational, I ultimately took up his offer to meet (made in his May 18th article), and when we met near the end of June, 2016, at The Hotel Vivor in Kohima, I found him to be a warm, caring, and open-minded man, a man who obviously loved his fellow Nagas very much.
Since that lunch, we have corresponded periodically, before I left Nagaland to go home to Albany, New York, USA, at the end of July, and since I got home. (I will be back in Nagaland on 5 February for five months.) One of my recent e-mails to him asked him to answer two questions: first, what would he recommend to his people if the details of the Framework Agreement are released and have no offer of a sovereign nation for the Naga people (which I predicted would be the case in my article of 4 April 2016 in The Morung Express)?, and, two, what would he recommend to his fellow Nagas if the Government of India (GoI) never releases any details and continues to drag out the peace talks indefinitely, talks that have been going on for approximately 18 years?
In response, he published a piece in The Morung Express, the Nagaland Post, and the Eastern Mirror, on 24 or 25 September 2016 (based on which paper you read). He was kind enough to send me a copy directly, with an e-mail which says, “I know you may not agree with my Biblical stands but this article may answer half of your question!” The article is titled, “The need for defending truth so that justice can prevail”.
My article, below, is my response to him. Because my response is forcing me to address issues that have preoccupied me ever since I started to study the Naga nationalist movement, and because so many of the articles I have read by other activists in the three papers mentioned above, and in other material, contain these issues, I felt that it would be useful to address them publicly.
From my first article (on 4 April 2016) to this moment, in every word I've written or spoken to any Naga who will read or listen to me, I have always said that my position on the Naga cause is that it is doomed to failure. This conclusion is not based on the merits of the Naga arguments. In other words, I presume that the truth, as viewed by Nagas, would lead to a conclusion that, in the name of justice, would require the GoI to withdraw from Nagaland and other areas where there are Nagas, and allow the Nagas to maintain their territory as a sovereign nation. I have never stated otherwise. My whole argument has always been that, for a variety of reasons, the GoI will not, cannot, allow the Nagas to have a sovereign nation. I furthermore stated that, at some point, the GoI will lose patience with the Naga activists pushing for a separate nation, will tire of dragging out the peace process with no compromise by the Nagas as to an ultimate demand for a sovereign nation, and will physically crush the Nagas, will in fact finish the bloody job that they started in the 1950s and '60s.
So my argument against a sovereign Naga nation is not to come down on the side of the GoI in relation to the “truth” and “justice” of any argument, but to preserve the life of Nagas in the face of possible injustice on the part of the GoI. In other words, I'm choosing life over justice for the Naga people (presuming that all arguments are on the side of the Nagas. I've never read a vigorous defense of the GoI's position, certainly not by any Naga activist).
Kaka, in his September article, states two things that I want to address. First, he states, “Instead of defending the truth, we are desperately seeking after alternative pragmatic solutions. And if any half baked solution will bring in more money, we seem ready to even sell the thousands of lives that have been sacrificed in the alter of the political truth that Nagas are not Indians and Nagaland is not Indian territory.” What Kaka never addresses is the life of those living now! He, as so many activists do, treats the average citizen condescendingly because they have taken advantage of the education and jobs that come with being a “scheduled tribe.” Those citizens who enjoy these advantages and do not want to give them up are considered, by the activists (and the generalization by me is fair), as traitors to the cause, or, at best, as becoming soft and lazy.
I do not agree with that attitude. Whether you view their benefits as a ploy by the GoI as a device to divide the Nagas, or in any other negative fashion, it is your condescension and disregard of the average Naga citizen that is immoral. They have a right to care about the living: their children and grandchildren, their comforts earned by working, and their education which will hopefully take them to Bangalore or even Albany, New York, where so many Indians now live in prosperity and safety due to a good education. If you activists want to fight and die for the dead of fifty and sixty years ago, that is your right. But you are immoral if you view your attitude as the only correct one. As I am trying to argue here, individual Nagas have a right to their own value system, and if they view life, prosperity, and education as more important than your view of justice, that is their right, and to denigrate it, as all activists do, is simply wrong. The average citizen may believe that life is much better than it has ever been, and peace and the rule of law is more important to them than continuing the battle for a separate sovereign nation.
In fairness to Kaka, toward the end of his article, he does address violence: “But will we have the courage to expose and defend the truth whatever the consequences may be[?] This appeal is, by the way, not a call back to arms and violence (though we must be prepared for even such an eventuality). But since there is a ceasefire, this call, at this juncture, is a call for fidelity to the political truths of our nation. In conclusion, Justice will not prevail if truth is not defended. Consequently, if there is no justice there will also be no peace.”
I disagree. There can be peace without justice, at least your version of justice. There are times when leaders must accept a thing called reality. There is a pyramid of needs for human survival: at the base, the most fundamental, is life. Without life, there is no justice, no truth, nothing. Kaka's nonchalance in discussing, being “prepared for even such an eventuality [the eventuality of “arms and violence”], expresses an attitude of uncaring for the living, as if the mention of the necessity of war is no big deal, that the life of the average citizen is one not worth worrying about, since to do so would betray those who died for the cause long ago.
The living take priority over the dead! You can honor the dead, but the most sacred thing is the living. The living are not only more sacred than the dead, but more sacred than a nation state, more sacred than anything on earth or in heaven. To use God as a justification to have people die is to abuse God. God does not ask innocent people to die, and neither Kaka nor any other activist can define for any other Naga who is innocent and who is not, who should live and who should die.
I want to conclude with some relevant quotes, quotes which I suggest all activists read more than once, read so they sink in, not to be read as an obligation so they can discard them within a few seconds of reading them.
First, I want to quote the last paragraph of one of the most famous poems coming out of World War I, by Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est”:
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him [a British soldier just gassed by the Germans] in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, – My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.* [* “it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country”]
My second quote is from The Economist, the October 1st, 2016 issue, at page 54:
In part it states: [The sociologist Max] Weber described an “abysmal opposition” between two types of ethics. Those following their convictions wish to preserve their own moral purity, not matter what consequences their policies may have in the real world. “If a action of good intent leads to bad results, then, in the actor's eyes, not he but the world, or the stupidity of other men, or God's will who made them thus, is responsible for the evil.” By contrast, someone guided by responsibility “takes account of precisely the average deficiencies of people ...(H)e ddoes not even have the right to presuppose their goodness and perfection.” This sort of politician will answer for all the consequences of his actions, even unintended ones. …. Ethicists of conviction, he said, were “in nine out of ten cases windbags”. A classic case of not caring about the consequences of one's acts are my own co-religionists living on the West Bank of the Jordan River. Being brought up a Jew, and volunteering for Israel during the last major war there (October 1973), where I spent six months doing manual labor on a kibbutz in the Jordan Valley just below the Sea of Galilee, I have always had a strong interest in the politics there.
It is my opinion that the Orthodox Jews on the West Bank care nothing for life. They are imbued with a self-serving view as “the Chosen People,” mandated by God (Yahweh) to maintain possession of Judea and Samaria, no matter what the consequences of the people there or in Israel. It is my hope that the Israeli military removes them from the West Bank, using all necessary force, and that the people of Israel bury the whole concept of The Chosen People (of whom, technically, I am one), and all that is related to this concept. I would trade all of them and their religious precepts, to save the life of one Palestinian or Israeli child.
My last quote is from a book titled, Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman, a Russian author. It is a very long book and is considered the greatest book ever written on the Soviet Union under Stalin during World War II. There are many characters in the book (eight pages of characters are listed in the back of the book, under different headings related to the action in the book, e.g., the Battle of Stalingrad). I'm going to quote a whole page, a page which is a chapter in itself. It comes after a detailed description of a group of Jews being taken off a cattle car at Auschwitz, the main extermination camp of the Nazis, marched into the gas chamber complex (where hair is cut, etc.), and then gassed to death. Earlier in the book we meet the Jews in the cattle car as it traverses Europe toward the gas chamber, so we are familiar with the characters as they enter, and die in, the gas chamber. The action focuses on a small boy who has lost his family and is hanging onto a female Russian Army doctor. They both die together in the crowded gas chamber pressed up against each other. That is the last sentence in the previous chapter, the last page of which is included here. Then this one-page chapter appears. Please excuse the underlining, as when I read the pages, I did not think that I'd be putting any of them in an article for a newspaper. But it is just as well, for the underlining obviously shows the reader the things that moved me when I read the two pages.
The two paragraphs are as moving a passage as I've ever read about the sacredness of life. I want to emphasize that all activists in Nagaland and elsewhere who are interested in sacrificing people, not just themselves but others, have an obligation to read this page, and reread it, until they are clear as to what they are asking of their people.
They owe their people serious regard for each individual life.
I've said enough on the subject of life and justice. It is the obligation of the opinion leaders in the community to take their responsibility seriously. That means that they should consider the possibility that they are WRONG, that they are steering their people to their deaths, that they should not have the hubris and condescension to dismiss any concerns for the average Naga who may want to continue the life they are leading and not fight the continuous battle for a sovereign nation.
The leaders have an obligation to worry more about the living than the dead, more about the future than the past, less about truth and justice, and more about each individual life.
Robert A. Silverstein
